Kennedy and Vietnam: Ignored During Assassination Remembrance

The assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963 transpired exactly three weeks after the assassination of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem. J.F.K. clearly had blood on his hands in his support of the coup that led to the autocrat’s death in Saigon, now appropriately renamedÂ Ho Chi Minh City.

President Kennedy’s Role in the Genocide and War Crimes in Vietnam.

While the death of the U.S. president was an egregious, tragic and destructive act, what has been lost is the role J.F.K. played in the mass murder andÂ escalation of theÂ Vietnam War. For too long only Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were associated with this monstrous war but in remembering John F. Kennedy, we should hold him accountable for the escalation of the Vietnam War as well.

During the Kennedy Thousand Days, the number of U.S. invaders increased from 685 to 16,000.

The first U.S. combat deaths occurred with some seventy-eight dying in Nam. Their names are on the wall in Washington, D.C. The first purple hearts for wounded in action were bestowed during the Camelot years of military “advisers” dealing death in Vietnam.

J.F.K. created concentration camps in Vietnam that were dubbed Strategic Hamlet Programmes. Yes, they were concentration camps, fueled by hate and idiocy whereby Vietnames peasants living in the south were uprooted to sever their ties to the emerging National Liberation Front, the Vietcong, who had no bases or forward deployment but lived among the people. The New Frontier believed if the people were forced behind barb-wire encampmentsÂ and were isolated from the Vietcong, the V.C. would wither and die without sustenance and support. Such was the thinking that this president allowed Defence SecretaryÂ Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk to implement these atrocities during the unjust, aggressive war in Southeast Asia. Of course, the Vietcong freedom fighters against the Diem government would then target the Strategic Hamlets and the agony of the repatriated simply contributed to even greater support for the V.C. By Kennedy’s death at the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald, or so it seems, fully half of South Vietnam’s population was in support of the resistance. Kennedy, ever the Cold Warrior and booster for style and fashion for himself and the military, created the Green Berets hats and sent special forces into the quagmire in Vietnam. Helicopter gunships were used for the first time as well.

With the war already lost, Mr Kennedy planned a coup to overthrow President Diem that led to his murder and that of his disreputable brother on November 1, 1963. Three weeks later the American president was dead which hardly represented a decision to draw down the war. No, let’s remember Kennedy for his criminal role in Vietnam, and forget his looks, pretty family and American University speech: he was a war criminal and should be judged for this character flaw and criminal contribution to mass murder of non-whites in Indochina!

Indeed, theÂ baton was passed to L.B.J. after the Kennedy killing in Dallas who merely escalated the war to more murderous heights and mayhem.